Vol. xxiii #3

September, 2002

Carlos Mario Castro

An anecdotal professor of philosophy used to tell us, during afternoons dedicated to Kant and Copernican spins, that we should learn to move about in history like chimpanzees swinging from tree to tree. He emphasized this not only because he was aware of how weak our grasp of history was, but also because this old, strict professor was convinced of the importance of history in a world with symptoms of Alzheimer's in its memory: quick to forget the lessons of the past, always ready to trip over the same obstacles in our journey towards a better future.

I have remembered my old professor and his goads in favor of history because teatro la fragua is in full season with its Historical Trilogy, recreating the lives and battles of Bartolomé Las Casas, Francisco Morazán, and Archbishop Romero. This ambitious artistic project began 10 years ago, in 1992, when the Honduran Ministry of Foreign Relations commissioned from la fragua a work to celebrate the bicentennial of the national hero Francisco Morazán: the result was Alta es la noche, adaptation of the novel The Sorcerers of Ilamatepeque by the Honduran Ramón Amaya Amador. The work examines the epoch of Central American independence, and the doomed efforts of Morazán to create a federation of the various nations of the region. Francisco Morazán followed the lead of the South American liberator Simón Bolívar, who attempted to adapt to Latin American reality the enlightenment values and ideals of the French Revolution. Alta es la noche was the first of the works of the Trilogy and it gave artistic expression to the dream that is still under construction: Central American unity.

The assassination of Archbishop Romero in El Salvador in 1980 is a key event which has profoundly marked the recent history of Central America. Jack Warner, the Jesuit director of teatro la fragua, saw immediately that it was an event which had to be given theatrical form. After studying various scripts without being satisfied with the treatment given the event (which easily lends itself to propaganda), Warner encountered in 1994 a script by the Chicano playwright Carlos Morton, and decided that he had finally found the text that he had been looking for about Romero and the turbulent decade of the 80's. A first version opened in July 1999 under the name Romero de Las Américas, adding a second link to the Trilogy.

The theme of the Conquest of America by the Europeans has been present from the beginning in the artistic projects of teatro la fragua. Conscious of the significance of the event in the history of Central America, Warner wanted to present the controversial Conquest from the point of view of the figure of Bartolomé Las Casas. At one point he thought of adapting La audiencia de los confines, a script of Miguel Ángel Asturias, but the text didn't satisfy him completely. In 1997, in a Latin American theatre workshop in Colombia, Warner met Enrique Buenaventura (renowned Colombian playwright) and he mentioned his hopes to develop a piece on Bartolomé de Las Casas and the epoch of the Conquest and colonization. And Buenaventura turned over to teatro la fragua his text Réquiem por el padre Las Casas,an unpublished work that had yet to be staged. It took only a first reading for Warner to know that this was the text he had been looking for, and immediately he started entering it in the computer. Four years later, on July 20 2001, teatro la fragua opened Réquiem por el padre Las Casas.

After years of search and a great deal of work, the Historical Trilogy was finally complete, permitting a season of the three works in sequence in El Progreso and in the Museum of Anthropology and History in San Pedro Sula. teatro la fragua is trying to fill a permanent gap and to bring history converted into theatre to the memory of the Honduran people, where the majority do not have access to education or books and who are almost completely ignorant of the events and personalities that fill their past and which in great part have formed the reality of the present.

In one of the speeches of Réquiem por el padre Las Casas, don Gaspar, an indigenous cacique, tells the tribunal of the Inquisition: "If it had not been for Father Las Casas we would be dead, our language would not exist and no one would know that we have a history. A history -- referring to the Europeans -- as ancient as yours is". In a very real sense what teatro la fragua has tried to do via the Trilogy, and in general with the whole gamut of its work, is to create a theatrical chronicle of the elements that make up the historical biography of Honduras and Central America. Such creation is especially important in the context of cultural globalization, which tries to suppress the diversity of expression of all cultures, especially to suppress the voice of those cultures labeled inferior or under-developed. These historical works aim to be a strong voice which demands its right to proclaim that Central America also has its history, that in the Central American countries there exists a chronicle of hopes and ideals that should be known, respected and paid attention to.

Many years ago in Panama I knew a Jesuit, a great humanist, a diehard scholar who began work at four in the morning, an authentic teacher of the Socratic school, whose classes were a sparkling wonder of creativity and humor. Many times this Jesuit told us that our generation was incapable of relating the events of the past with the present as a result of the influence of television (of which we are children). Television may teach many things, but it does not teach relationships; each channel is its own island and we jump from island to island without as much as a comma or a period to relate them. In this sense, another objective of la fragua's Historical Trilogy is to teach especially the young to relate the different stages and events of history; that they experience the always surprising discovery that many of the situations which today overwhelm us, sink their roots in the yesterdays of our ancestors, that these problems aren't new (in spite of the fanatics who see in them the signs of the end of the world or of total decadence), but are the continuation of something begun long ago and which like Sisyphus of Greek mythology we have been eternally repeating. One example of how the three works maintain a premeditated continuity is found in a scene of Romero de Las Américas: Romero asks when the exploitation and lack of respect for human rights began in El Salvador; Rutilio Grande answers him humorously "five hundred years ago with the arrival of the conquistadores."

The Historical Trilogy presents 500 years of human evolution, recreating artistically the major problems that have appeared in the course of that evolution: the horrors of wars, political and religious fanaticisms and their interminable list of immolated victims; as well as the attempts of humanity, symbolized in Las Casas, Morazán and Romero, to change the course of history in the direction of values of love, justice and unconditional solidarity, and the fight to establish respect for human dignity without distinction, especially the dignity of those who are excluded and marginalized. The works are a mirror which uses beauty and clarity to provide us with an X-ray of ideas and of the human heart without falling into malicious Manicheanisms, nor into the tunnel vision of any ideology. And in doing so la fragua joins the efforts of many persons in many different places who from different perspectives are fighting for a better humanity.

The staging of each of the plays has required an extraordinary labor on the part of the director and of the young actors of la fragua. I remember especially the first days of rehearsals of Réquiem. First came detailed readings of the text, scene by scene. These readings were pleasant sessions of serious delving into history. For Jack Warner it was very important that the actors be conscious of all the richness of historical content found in Buenaventura's text. And so he dedicated a great deal of energy to explaining the historical context, the customs and the intellectual ambience behind every line of the script. For example, Buenaventura incorporates into the text the character of a loan shark who offers financing (with interest) for the adventures of the conquistadores and even of Las Casas himself. Warner explained to the actors how the figure of the loan shark was a prominent place in the story in order to emphasize that the Conquest brought with it a new economic model, nascent capitalism, and that the banks, the financial organizations and the great beast of the external debt (as he calls it) which we know today are lethal, more sophisticated versions of those ambitious and astute loan sharks who proliferated during the Conquest.

Jorge Luis Borges says that history is not a frigid museum. This dictum is given life in the theatrical work of la fragua;with originality and an unfolding of creativity and talent, teatro la fragua makes of history an attractive, sensual experience in which the characters and historical events come back to life, and the stage is converted into an authentic time machine, transporting us through the artifice of lights, music, acting and dance on a tour of the most important moments of the Honduran and Central American history. The musical texture of the works makes use of reggae, salsa, Latin rock, popular corridos and ballads. The music is an important element which gives vitality and force to historical texts that in other contexts would be heavy and boring for an audience with little dexterity for navigating language and the written or spoken word. The incidental music in two of the works is music of the period, giving us an auditory entry into the spirit of the epoch: thus the music of William Byrd, contemporary of Las Casas, frames the action of Réquiem, and music of Domenico Scarlatti, official composer of the Spanish court, that of Alta es la noche. For Romero de las Américas, the incidental music is the work of Domenico Zipoli, the Italian Jesuit composer who worked in the Paraguay Reductions and helped the Indians form the bases of a new Mestizo art. And in this way la fragua is also putting the audience in contact with some of the important musical traditions which have accompanied and rejuvenated human history in the last 500 years. The three works are like three huge murals of the kind created by Diego Rivera in Mexico, which immediately and realistically put the audience in a direct dialogue with its history. Not without reason Borges has said that time is the hidden snare of which we are made ("in today are all our yesterdays") and that only the poet, the artist, can feel and decipher the human mystery enclosed in that time.

Alfred Tennyson as a young man wrote the phrase, "Time flowing through the middle of the night." I believe that adolescent verse of the English poet describes very well what has been happening in the middle of the night, when the actors of la fragua have presented the plays of the Historical Trilogy and the attentive and deeply moved audience has seen time flow, has lived its own history, dispelling the mist of the mystery of what we are and who we are. It is possible that remembering yesterday, as la fragua is doing artistically, we can manage to exorcise that all too certain refrain attributed to Santayana: that those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it.